The House Democratic leader made the bold claim that health care reform should require "consensus" and "real knowledge," apparently forgetting 2010.

By NTK Staff | 03.24.2017 @12:15pm

Buried in a New York Times story about the American Health Care Act (AHCA) – or ‘Trumpcare’ – is a rich quote from House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, architect of the House’s 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act.

Emphasis ours:

“I don’t know whether he will ultimately succeed or fail, but I will tell you that President Trump is so transactional, who knows what transactions he will be willing to make to pass this,” said Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader, who passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010 as speaker.

“So far he’s acting like a rookie. It’s really been amateur hour,” she added. “He seems to think that a charm offensive or a threat will work — that saying ‘I can do this for you’ or ‘I can do this against you’ will work. That’s not the way it works. You have to build real consensus, and you have to gain a real knowledge of the policy — and the president hasn’t done either of those things.”

Let’s take these each in turn.

“CONSENSUS”

The Affordable Care Act (ACA, or Obamacare) passed the House in March 2010, with zero Republican votes. The Washington Postnoted at the time that “[i]t has inflamed the partisanship that Obama pledged to tame when he campaigned for the White House and has limited Congress’s ability to pass any other major legislation.”

To this day, Pelosi blames any of Obamacare’s problems on Republicans.